Tobacco

March 08, 2018

Let me tell you a story about the Washington DC corporate law firm, Covington & Burling.

A huge cache of documents made public during the state attorneys general litigation against the tobacco industry in the late 1990s revealed that this firm, which for decades represented the tobacco industry, was an early force behind the “tort reform” movement. Big Tobacco would funnel money to tort reform groups through Covington. The point was to pass laws to keep cigarette companies from ever being sued in court for promoting addiction through manipulation of nicotine levels, engaging in a secret campaign to hook teens and even pre-teens and lying to government officials and the public. A Covington partner named Keith A. Teel was the firm’s tobacco point man and even boasted about setting up “tort reform” groups with tobacco money. (See much more here.)

In addition to the release of millions of documents, the state tobacco litigation resulted in a $200 billion settlement. The settlement reimbursed 46 states for costs dealing with one of the biggest public health disasters in modern times. To get this incredible result, the states all used outside law firms, who worked for years without pay and risked being paid nothing at all. (Or as a plaintiff law firm might have put it, “the attendant risk that we might receive no fee whatsoever, and dedicated efforts by our team in hard-fought, complex litigation lasting over … years.” Emphasis so you’ll remember this.)

Many retainer agreements between AGs and private firms were made public, usually showing a standard contingency fee of around 15 percent, lower than typical 1/3 arrangements, despite the huge risks and the small likelihood of a plaintiff win. Yet when the industry began to settle these cases, most private counsel gave up the contracted fee and amiably agreed, along with the tobacco industry, to arbitrated fee decisions. In announcing the first fee award to attorneys in Florida, Texas and Mississippi in December 1998, to be paid by the tobacco companies over a minimum of 10 years, labor mediator and panel Chairman John Calhoun Wells said, “[N]otwithstanding all the efforts by individuals who committed years of their lives to achieving progress on this issue, without these outside counsel, there would be no multibillion-dollar settlements for the states to reimburse tobacco-related health expenses and provide funds for educational efforts to reduce youth smoking.”

Looping back to Covington & Burling. In 1996, Covington’s Keith Teel met with Texas Attorney General Dan Morales to try to derail the Texas AG’s tobacco suit altogether (which no doubt included payment of attorneys’ fees that came out of the industry’s pocket). Fortunately Texas ignored him, and the industry ultimately paid the state $15 billion.

Covington’s attacks on lawsuits and those who use the civil justice system didn’t end in the 1990s, however. Lately, one of their partners and Trump advisor, Phil Howard, has made a name for himself “attacking corporate regulations and the civil jury system [by] using inflammatory stereotypes about public protection laws and attorneys for the injured to deflect attention from the misdeeds of those he defends.” For example,

As for sexual harassment claims? Barring some overt form of ‘quid pro quo,” (presumably a promotion conditioned on a sexual favor would qualify) Howard would prohibit those too. If "just offensive comments," are at issue, says Howard, women should simply embrace the laws of the locker room and get over it. The alternative, he says, would kill "the spontaneity needed" for a “healthy” work environment.

Covington & Burling LLP came under fire March 5 for a $125 million fee it received to represent the state of Minnesota in its $5 billion environmental lawsuit against 3M Co., which settled Feb. 20 for $850 million.

At a March 5 Minnesota House Ways and Means Committee hearing, state Rep. Sarah Anderson (R) questioned the Big Law firm’s contingency arrangement with the state, reached in 2010.

“I’m just curious as to why we are paying a law firm $125 million for seven years of work,” she said. Referring to her own math, she said the sum works out to about $48,000 per day. “That seems a little steep.” She also said all the legal fees are being shipped outside the state because Covington doesn’t have an office in Minnesota.

“Covington has represented the State of Minnesota in environmental matters for more than 20 years, including the NRD [3M] litigation that was recently resolved. Our work on the NRD case involved a contingency fee arrangement, the attendant risk that we might receive no fee whatsoever, and dedicated efforts by our team in hard-fought, complex litigation lasting over seven years,” a Covington spokesman told Big Law Business in an email.

Hoping that sounds familiar.

We’ve covered a lot of hypocrites in our day, but this one may take the cake.

February 27, 2015

I’m guessing if you made a list of the biggest flim flam artists of all time, the tobacco industry would be right at the top. In 2006, “a federal district court determined that tobacco companies ‘knew there was a consensus in the scientific community that smoking caused lung cancer and other diseases’ by at least January 1964,’ and … nonetheless engaged in a campaign to ‘mislead the public about the health consequences of smoking.’” In 2012, a federal judge ordered the industry “to publicly admit, through advertisements and package warnings, that they deceived American consumers for decades about the dangers of smoking” including the fact that “secondhand smoke kills over 3,000 Americans each year.” Notice how recently this all took place. It never stops.

Take the new e-cigarette craze, which the industry markets as an aide to quit smoking. But a new study was released Thursday showing that “40 percent of tobacco consumers use multiple products, such as cigarillos, hookah and cigars..… The most common combination of products among youth and adults was cigarettes and e-cigarettes.” Based on this research, it seems just as likely that e-cigarettes are a gateway to smoking as they are a tool for quitting. So far, FDA regulation in this area has not been strong enough.

So what’s the alternative? Well, one might be the filing of a class action lawsuit. Indeed, on Thursday, in a 6 to 1 decision, the Arkansas Supreme Court allowed a class action to proceed against Philip Morris over Marlboro Lights, which were falsely marketed from 1971 to 2010 as “healthier” alternatives with lower tar and nicotine. Writes AP, “The company wants each case considered separately, saying some smokers bought the cigarettes for their taste, packaging or brand reputation — not for claims they had lower tar and nicotine.” The court clearly didn't buy that!

Class actions can be the most efficient way for tobacco cases to go forward but unfortunately not every court agrees. In 2006, the Florida Supreme Court “threw out a $145 billion class-action verdict against cigarette makers.” That meant the smokers and their families have had to file “individual wrongful death and personal injury lawsuits based on cigarette use.” Luckily, however, “[t]hat decision let stand findings that the companies knowingly sold dangerous products and hid smoking hazards, meaning future juries could consider that as proven fact.”

A $100 million settlement has been reached between three major tobacco companies and hundreds of people who sued them for smoking-related deaths and illnesses in Florida federal court.

The tentative agreement announced Wednesday involves R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., Philip Morris USA Inc. and Lorillard Tobacco Co. The deal resolves about 400 cases pending before a federal judge in Jacksonville, Florida, but does not affect thousands of other lawsuits pending in Florida state courts.

Those must still be litigated, one by one. Seems like an incredible waste of judicial resources but that's what happens when cases cannot proceed as a class.

As a number of consumer and public interest organizations told Congress yesterday in anticipation of today's (another unnecessary) hearing examining whether this country benefits from class actions:

[C]lass actions are critically important to compensate victims of illegal behavior and to deter corporate law-breaking.… When a company practices a pattern of discrimination or receives a large windfall through small injuries to large numbers of people, a class action lawsuit is the only realistic way harmed individuals can afford to challenge this wrongdoing in court.

A new report proves many of these points, as did the Center for Justice & Democracy's study, published last year. Honestly, what more evidence does Congress need?

February 05, 2014

The tobacco industry has got to be feeling some heat today and not just from burning cigarettes. It’s been all over the news that CVS – the nation’s #2 drugstore chain - will stop selling any kind of tobacco products by October 1. Now the #1 chain – Walgreens – is getting hounded to do the same thing:

Consumers across social media have been fervently calling on Walgreen Company (NYSE: WAG) to follow CVS’s unprecedented lead. On Wednesday, health-conscious social media users descended on the Walgreens Facebook page, asking the Deerfield, Ill., company to commit to a smokeless future at its 8,500-plus locations. Some avowed Walgreens customers threatened to start shopping at is smoke-free competitor if their requests for a tobacco ban are not heeded. “I hope I don’t have to pass by my corner Walgreens to support CVS now,” wrote one Facebook user.

It was a similar story on Twitter, where many users tweeted Wednesday morning with the hashtag #CVSquits.

Walgreens is “evaluating” but if they take this step, it would be a huge turnaround for this company. In fact, in 2008, Walgreens sued to challenge the constitutionality of a San Francisco ordinance “that prohibited the sale of tobacco products in drug stores” arguing that “the ordinance was discriminatory in that it singled out drugstores but left grocery chains free to sell tobacco products.”

Actually, litigation has become the tobacco industry’s weapon of choice to invalidate local ordinances aimed at cutting down smoking. Just last week, Lorillard, R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris USA and three trade groups filed a federal lawsuit to block a New York City “ordinance passed last fall that set a minimum price of $10.50 for every pack of cigarettes sold in the city, and prohibited the use of coupons or other promotional discounts to lower that price. The coupon ban also applies to other forms of tobacco.”

Tobacco manufacturers and sellers say those restrictions on discounts are an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights.…

The suit asks the court to block parts of the law from taking effect in March. It does not challenge the most high-profile section of the law, which banned the sale of tobacco products to anyone under the age of 21.

New York City's pricing rules were signed into law in November by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. They were the last in a string of anti-tobacco rules and laws that he championed over his 12 years as mayor that made New York City's cigarettes the costliest in the country. Retail prices now often exceed the minimum set by the city, due to high taxes. Bloomberg left office at the end of December. …

The tobacco industry filed a similar lawsuit against the city of Providence, R.I., when it implemented a ban on coupons and discounts. That legal challenge failed when the city's rules were upheld by a federal appeals court.

Of course, these industry lawsuits are terribly ironic. As we have noted before, the “tort reform” movement began in the 1980s and 1990s largely fueled by cigarette company money. They sought – and got - legislation immunizing the industry against products liability claims in several states. Hypocrite? They’ve been called worse.

July 02, 2012

It has always fascinated me how the political operatives and pollsters aligned with the “tort reform” movement have used doctors to provide cover for their tobacco-fueled movement.

For example, back in 2002, a Texas group called Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA) in Weslaco organized a “Doctor’s Walkout” in the Rio Grande Valley to push for legislative restrictions on patients’ rights to sue malpracticing physicians (which, of course, eventually happened. ) As the Center for Justice & Democracy showed in its 2000 reportThe CALA Files: The Secret Campaign by Big Tobacco and Other Major Industries to Take Away Your Rights, CALA groups were and are part of a corporate-backed network of front groups that have received major financial and strategic assistance from organizations linked to Big Tobacco.

Polling has always been one of the activities of these front groups. For example, early on, they decided – correctly - that everyday folks have no clue what “tort reform” actually means. (If you check out the film Hot Coffee, it’s apparent that 25 years after the founding of the American Tort Reform Association, no one still knows what “tort reform” means.) But they figured something else out – everyone understands the words “lawsuit abuse.” Didn’t matter that the so-called “reforms” they advocated, like capping compensation, had nothing whatsoever to do with abusive lawsuits since they only kicked in after a seriouly injured person won their case.

As CJ&D found, the “lawsuit abuse” message may have been first cooked up back in the early 1990s via a South Texas survey commissioned by the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation and TPPF’s Center for Lawsuit Reform. (TPPF, by the way, continues to pop up in the news, most recently in support of its tainted corporate allies, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which we last covered here. ) The TPPF survey, conducted by President Bush's 2004 pollster Jan van Lohuizen, determined that the issue of “lawsuit abuse” polled well with 67 percent of the south Texas residents surveyed. Compared to other campaigns, the study reported, “this level of awareness is quite high.”

So not surprisingly, dozens of “Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse” groups then started popping up around the country, organized by ATRA’s PR firm, APCO. (Read all about it here.) The money trail from many of them led directly to large corporate donors. This included the tobacco industry, which would funnel money through the Washington DC law firm Covington & Burling – current home anti-jury corporate lawyer Phil Howard, who we’ve covered before, like here.

What’s this all have to do with today, you may ask? Well just last week, Media Matters found a priceless Fox News clip where conservative pollster Frank Luntz instructed a physician to get in line, stop using the phrase “tort reform” and use “lawsuit abuse reform” instead. Surprised he didn’t go one step further and tell him to just join his local Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse group, where his interests would be well-represented alongside those of cigarette companies. Better yet, why not create a new group called Doctors and Cigarette Companies Against Lawsuit Abuse? No sense beatin' around bush.An error occurred with the video embed.

May 23, 2012

Governors, better start taking good notes. If you thought you were having money woes already, wait until the American Legislative Exchange Council comes to town Actually, they’ve probably already been there (and yes, we know you know).

ALEC and the big corporate members who control its agenda have a thing – a very big thing – against state Attorneys General (see more here), especially the ones who target corrupt and harmful corporate practices and force these big corporations to pay the state back – with millions or sometimes billion of dollars. (Note that these lawsuits don’t cost the state a thing even when the AG brings in outside help, because fees are all paid by the companies – not the taxpayers.)

So for example, in the late 1990s, state attorneys general in 46 states forced the tobacco industry to settle for more than $200 billion to reimburse states for having shelled out huge funds (via state Medicaid budgets) to pay for one of the biggest public health disasters in modern times - the one caused by cigarette smoking. These lawsuits also exposed the industry’s corrupt practices, uncovering for the first time how it promoted addiction through manipulation of nicotine levels, engaged in a secret campaign to hook teens and even pre-teens and lied to government officials and the public. (See more in this CJ&D fact sheet.)

Turns out that getting fraudulent and in some cases criminal corporations to pay states back (not to mention taxpayers who were hurt or ripped off) is just something state AG’s do, thank goodness. There are countless other examples.

Like in October 2008, when Eli Lilly settled with 33 state AG’s over Lilly’s marketing of the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa. Somewhat like the tobacco companies, Lilly had deliberately kept information from doctors and consumers about Zyprexa’s links to severe weight gain and elevated blood sugar, both known risk factors for diabetes, because it would weaken sales. What’s more, several state AGs pursed individual lawsuits against Lilly, which they only could do with the help of outside counsel. In April 2010, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell announced a $20 million Zyprexa settlement with nearly $17 million going to the state’s general fund, $3 million reimbursing the state’s Medicaid fund and the company pledging to significantly change the way it marketed Zyprexa. In October 2009, South Carolina reached a $45 million settlement with Lilly - over $37 million went to Medicaid/State Health Plan reimbursement, with Lilly pledging to institute significant changes in how it marketed Zyprexa. As then-South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster explained when announcing the settlement, “The Eli Lilly case was handled on a contingent basis by special counsel appointed by the attorney general. Special counsel paid and incurred all up front costs associated with bringing the case, and their expertise in similar pharmaceutical litigation was instrumental in its successful resolution.”

We could go on and on, but you get the idea. (See more examples here, here.) So to sum up, AG’s get states large sums of free money from corporate wrongdoers, reimbursing state coffers at no cost to the state. Enter ALEC.

Yesterday, after refusing to even allow Mississipppi AG Jim Hood to speak at a legislative hearing, Mississippi lawmakers moved at "warped speed" to pass an ALEC bill that strips away significant powers from Hood, a pro-consumer AG and the only statewide Democrat in office. Mississippi, you will recall, had led the nation in going after the tobacco industry and getting billions back for state governments. ALEC has made plenty sure that won’t be happening again in Mississippi.

"In the past eight years the office has recovered more than $600 million for our taxpayers from wrongdoers without costing the taxpayers one dime ... However, the huge corporate interests that paid for and supported this bill through the American Legislative Exchange Council have decided that they did not like having to pay what they owed the taxpayers of Mississippi."

And in terms of ALEC’s agenda, it gets worse. At its recent meeting in Charlotte, ALEC discussed its new scorched-earth approach: an unbelieveable bill that would simply stop an AG from bringing any kind of lawsuit unless they get prior state legislative approval.

March 26, 2012

You know how much I love quoting Ronald Reagan. (Kidding.) (No offense, Tea Party friends.) Here’s a good one: “We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

I’m guessing he believed that cigarette smokers, as one example, fell into that “individual accountability” category. But what if the law breakers are the people who are supposed to be enforcing the law? Should they be accountable? Which brings us to last night’s 60 Minutes, and a couple other hot topics.

The show last night was about the exoneration of Michael Morton, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife in 1987. He was freed after 25 years in prison based on DNA evidence, thanks to the hard work of the Innocence Project.

But, reports 60 Minutes, Morton’s attorneys, “recently discovered something astonishing: sitting in his prosecutor's file all those years was evidence that could have established Morton's innocence during his trial.” That evidence was a police report, relating how Morton’s then 3-year-old son, who witnessed the murder, described in detail the guy who really killed his mother, and it wasn’t Michael Morton. The DA who apparently failed to turn the report over to Morton at the time, Ken Anderson, later “was named prosecutor of the year in Texas and since 2002 he's been a district judge in the same court where Michael Morton was convicted. All those years, Morton languished in prison.”

Here’s some of the conversation between 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, and Logan and Anderson’s lawyer, Eric Nichols:

Lara Logan: So just to be clear, from both of you, you believe that Ken Anderson, the prosecutor in Michael's case, willfully, deliberately withheld evidence.

Barry Scheck: We believe that there's probable cause to believe that he violated a court order, withheld exculpatory evidence, and violated other laws of the State of Texas.

In February, a Texas judge agreed with Michael Morton's legal team that there was probable cause to believe Ken Anderson violated the law, and Anderson is now the subject of a special criminal inquiry. That's extremely rare. Studies have shown prosecutors are hardly ever criminally charged or disciplined for serious error or misconduct. And one thing Ken Anderson doesn't have to worry about is being sued for damages by Michael Morton because the Supreme Court has ruled that prosecutors have "absolute immunity" from civil lawsuits for their legal work.

Lara Logan: Doctors, lawyers, policemen, there are all kinds of people who do their job with limited immunity or no immunity. It just seems hard to understand why prosecutors have to have a different standard to everybody else.

Eric Nichols: Seeing that justice is done, in many instances, requires very difficult judgments. And to come back behind those prosecutors and second guess them, or sue them would throw a wrench into that system of prosecutors seeking justice.

Lara Logan: I have to say, there's a certain irony in hearing you say it's the job of a prosecutor to seek justice, right? Because in this particular case, that's exactly what Michael Morton did not get. …

Michael Morton: I don't have a lotta things really driving me. But one of the things is, I don't want this to happen to anybody else. Revenge isn't the issue here. Revenge, I know, doesn't work. But accountability works. It's what balances out. It's the equilibrium. It's the social glue in a way. Because if you're not count-- accountable, then you can do anything.

Pay attention, corporate and medical lobbies pushing for laws to limit their liability for wrongdoing, so-called "tort reform." He's talking about you. As Logan notes, accountability doesn’t just mean criminal accountability but also, civil liability - something we touched on last week in our post about how the civil justice system can sometimes step in where the criminal justice fails. That is, except if the destructive, corporate-backed, right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) (which we’ve covered many times, like here, here, here) has anything to do with it.

Paul Krugman's column in today’s New York Times, called "Lobbyists Guns and Money," hits it out of the park with a great piece about how ALEC is responsible for the spread of Stand Your Ground laws (among many other horrendous laws), which many believe not only contributed to the killing of Trayvon Martin but also, the failure by police to arrest his killer. Writes Krugman:

Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is. And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.

Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy. …

But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture? In part it’s the same old story — the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda. It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.

There’s a lot more in Krugman’s piece about the corrupting influence of corporate money behind ALEC’s work. So where does civil liability fit into this picture? Well, forget prosecutor immunity laws. These Stand Your Ground laws turn everyday people into prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, and then immunize them not just from criminal prosecution but also civil liability. Just like dirty prosecutors in Texas are protected. Just like the corporate members of ALEC are protected from civil liability when they commit wrongdoing, thanks to laws written and pushed by ALEC's civil justice task force, chaired by our friend Victor Schwartz, the General Counsel of the American Tort Reform Association. Here’s Victor, below. As they say, everything’s connected.

December 15, 2010

Remember how appalled we all were watching that two-year-old Indonesian boy chain smoking when his YouTube video went viral this year? I mean, there was outrage!

So tell me, is there so much difference between that tragic situation, and one right here in America, where Lorillard Tobacco Company parked a van outside of a housing project school playground handing out Newport menthol cigarettes to children, calling them “fun”? And getting kids hooked on nicotine at such a young age that it became nearly impossible for them later to quit?

A Massachusetts jury heard about this and yesterday, they expressed their outrage by hitting Lorillard with a $71 million verdict on behalf of the estate and son of a woman who was one of these children, who got these samples at least 50 times starting at age 9 and was addicted by age 13, tried unsuccessfully to quit 50 times and who eventually died of lung cancer. The Boston Globereports,

“It’s quite big in terms of not just the size of the award but really the reflected outrage of the jury after they learned of the detailed history of what Lorillard did in the 1950’s and 1960’s, acting in a predatory manner to promote Newports but at the direct expense of the health, safety, and very lives of people, including children,’’ said Edward L. Sweda Jr., senior lawyer for the Tobacco Products Liability Project at the Northeastern University School of Law.

The novel aspects of this case was its focus on Lorillard’s strategy of targeting urban neighborhood with Newport, a menthol brand that is popular among African-Americans. According to the Tobacco Products Liability Project at Northeastern, 75 percent of African-Americans prefer menthol brands.

For more, check out the radio interview with one of the Center for Justice & Democracy’s Civil Justice Resource Group members, Professor Richard Daynard who runs the Tobacco Products Liability Project at the Northeastern University School of Law.

November 17, 2010

When you think of health care and tobacco, I’m assuming what comes to mind are the shocking statistics, like “every year in the U.S. over 392,000 people die from tobacco-caused disease, making it the leading cause of preventable death.” Plus another 50,000 dying per year from second had smoke.

Hold onto your hats.

In 2000, the Center for Justice & Democracy published a breakthrough study on some of the more nefarious origins of the “tort reform” movement called The CALA Files -- The Secret Campaign By Big Tobacco And Other Major Industries To Take Away Your Rights, by Carl Deal and Joanne Doroshow.

Here are just a couple choice excerpts:

By 1992, the American Tort Reform Association had hired a public relations firm to help it reach its “tort reform” goals by creating local “grassroots” front groups. The contract was with a subsidiary of public relations titan Grey Advertising called APCO & Associates, a company that had specialized in “tort reform” lobbying since the 1980s and had worked for both insurance companies, like State Farm, and the tobacco industry.

A document uncovered in the Philip Morris files of the Tobacco Archives indicates that APCO and Neal Cohen, its “principal account executive on the PM [Philip Morris] Family Tort Project” had been, since 1988, “assisting the PM Family” on “national and state tort coalitions and other tort reform advocates with political, communications and grassroots strategies and related programs.”

There’s much more in The CALA Files about how APCO inserted itself into "tort reform" efforts in Texas, Louisiana and elsewhere using tobacco money that was funneled through a Washington DC corporate law firm called Covington & Burling. Covington's anti-jury partner, Philip K. Howard, is someone we’ve covered before.

Here is where it gets really interesting. Yesterday, former Cigna VP and now whistleblower Wendell Potter toldDemocracy Now’s host Amy Goodman about the panic that occurred in the health insurance industry when it learned that Michael Moore would be producing a documentary on the health care industry, called Sicko. Desperate to ensure that the film failed and that health care reform did not succeed, the health insurers hired APCO to create similar front groups to smear Michael, Sicko and any threat to insurance industry profits.

These excepts need little comment so please read for yourself:

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what was the grassroots strategy, if you had one, as the movie came out in the United States?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, one key component was to fund a front group, and that is something that I write about quite a bit in the book, about how special interests, and the insurance industry, in particular, will use premium dollars to funnel thousands and thousands, if not millions, of dollars to big PR firms to set up fake grassroots organizations—astroturf, as we call it—and front groups. And in this case, there was a front group that was set up called Health Care America, and the sole purpose for it to be set up was to attack Michael Moore and to attack the notion of a single-payer system in this country.

AMY GOODMAN: And who were the people who populated Health Care America?

WENDELL POTTER: There were just a couple of people. There was a woman. I think her name was—I can’t remember her name. Sarah Berk, I think, was her name. But the media contact for it was a guy named Bill Pierce, who I had known and worked with in the past. He used to be a PR guy for Blue Cross/Blue Shield Association. At that time, he was in the public relations firm APCO Worldwide. He was listed as a media contact, and if you called his number, you would have reached him at his desk at APCO Worldwide. It didn’t have any substance. It was just a—

AMY GOODMAN: What is APCO Worldwide?

WENDELL POTTER: It is a very, very big PR firm that was started several years ago by a big Washington law firm, Arnold & Porter. The A and P is Arnold & Porter, and they were defending—

AMY GOODMAN: APCO.

WENDELL POTTER: Yeah, and they were defending tobacco companies. So they felt that they needed to have help in the court of public opinion, as well as in the courtroom.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did Health Care America—who did they say they were?

WENDELL POTTER: They said they were representing consumers. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Did anyone expose this at the time?

WENDELL POTTER: No. No one did.

Potter goes on to discuss how lazy reporters and producers from the New York Times and CNN were duped by APCO. And it gets even nastier. Potter continued:

WENDELL POTTER: At one point during a strategy meeting, one of the people from APCO said that if our efforts, our initial efforts, were not successful, then we’d have to move to an element of the campaign to push Michael Moore off a cliff…”

Not literally, of course. But figuratively is bad enough. I think it's time for a new dead bolt.

July 19, 2009

We loved this great blog item from The Consumerist called “Top 10 Ironic Ads From History” and just about all of them have an ironic civil justice angle too. And some aren’t so “historical”. (But they are somewhat hysterical.)

Take, for example, the ad for the Bhopal India chemical plant, which ended up causing the worst industrial accident in the world. Had civil lawsuits against Union Carbide been allowed to proceed in U.S. courts, hundreds of thousands of injured people would have received a lot better justice.

Or one for the Corvair, a very dangerous GM car. What, GM sometimes puts unsafe cars on the road? No way. Way.

But in allowing the tobacco class action to go forward (so long as a “representative plaintiff” for the class meets Prop. 64’s rigid requirements), the California Supreme Court rejected Big Business’s view of the law. Otherwise, it said, Prop. 64 "would effectively eliminate the class-action lawsuit as a vehicle for the vindication of (consumer) rights."

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